Detention Level

cold, metal against bare skin, intruding overwhelming light-

"So," said the voice. "You're awake."

Ellen blinked, and blinked again.

She was upright, but not standing; her arms and legs were clamped to something by chill bands of metal, or something like it. When she tried to look down her head jerked against a marginally looser band and stopped. All around her, or at least all in front of her, was a field of shimmering blue light too bright to see through. She blinked once more.

There were figures just outside the field of light- tall, broad-shouldered, dark shapes, golden-eyed. They flanked a central figure, clad in brown, whose features she couldn't make out. Then it spoke, and she didn't need to see its face.

"Let's keep this nice and simple." It was the voice of the Enclave colonel who'd taken the purifier from her father- the voice of a dead man. There was no way anyone could have survived that. The rad-pulse had killed men in armor! But it was the same voice, and it kept talking: "You're going to tell me the code word for that purifier, and you're going to tell me now."

The last word lashed out like a whipcrack. Ellen scarcely noticed. Either the light-field was dimming or her eyes were getting used to it, but either way she could see the man's face... and, yes, it was the same man. Pale, haggard-looking, obviously ill, but the man she'd seen, the man who'd shot Janice. The man who-

It would have been nice to say she cut off that line of thought deliberately, but the simple fact was that her head was spinning, and so she blurted out "What the hell is going on here?" before the thought had even solidified itself.

The Enclave colonel scowled. "I'll tell you what's going on here," he snapped. In her dazed state Ellen found herself thinking that he sounded very, very strange. "You lost. The good guys won this one, and now we're just wrapping up loose ends. We've got the purifier. Now we just need the code word to start it. You're going to give me that code word now, and save us all a lot of trouble. Maybe I'll even let you go. So how about it?"

"You're supposed to be dead," Ellen murmured. "Why aren't you dead? Everybody else is dead."

"How I survived is irrelevant. Chalk it up to superior Enclave biomedical technology-"

"You talk funny. What's wrong with your accent?"

"I knew the Pentothal was a mistake," the Colonel muttered. "My father made sure I got proper elocution lessons as a boy. Now answer the damned question."

Ellen tried to shake her head, but the bindings wouldn't let her. "Mmm... no," she said. "I'm not going to tell you that."

If the Colonel had been a little more patient she would have told him, in all honesty, that she truly did not know her father had established a password on the purifier systems. But that, it seemed, was not about to happen. "I'll be honest," he said, tucking both his hands behind his back and leaning a little closer to the energy field. "I'm running out of patience here, and I'm not looking to play games with you. You tell me that code word, or it's going to cost you."

"No, seriously," Ellen said. It had occurred to her that she'd read the name Pentothal in one of her father's medical texts, long ago. It was a barbiturate. The Reds had used it as a truth serum when they interrogated prisoners of war, but it wasn't a very good one; the book had said there were ways around it. "Not going to tell you. You can go to hell, okay?"

"Why do you insist on provoking me?" the Colonel asked, his jaw clenching for a moment. "One word. One word! Tell me the code, NOW, before you or anybody else has to suffer for it!"

The armored figures on either side of him shifted as he stepped forward, one gloved hand reaching for the energy field's controls. Ellen flinched back as far as her restraints would allow.

And on the far wall of the room a single point of blue light flared into life, and the all-too-familiar voice of John Henry Eden said, "Colonel! I have need of you."

The armored figures froze. A snarl of frustration rippled across the Colonel's face before he spun on one heel to address the blue light. "Mr. President, I have no time for other matters. I'll be with you shortly."

"Now, Colonel," said Eden's voice. There was nothing of anger in it, only a mild rebuke one might direct at a naughty child.

"Yes, sir," said the Colonel through clenched teeth. He turned back to Ellen. "Don't start thinking anything stupid, girl. This is purely a teporary reprieve."

With that he stalked out of the room, his armored bodyguards trailing him. Ellen sagged in her restraints as the door closed behind him. She tried to think-

"Ah," said Eden's voice from the blue light on the wall. "Alone at last."

Startle-jumping when one's arms, legs, and head are restrained by metal is a painful experience. Ellen's breath hissed as she tried not to cry out.

"I do apologize for Colonel Autumn's attitude," Eden's voice said pleasantly. "He's been under a great deal of stress lately."

She stared at the blue light, and didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Or both.

"I've no doubt that you know who I am," Eden went on. "I'm sure you'e heard my radio broadcasts. I'd like to have a word with you face-to-face. I think there are a few things that you and I should discuss.You'll find some acceptable clothing in the locker near the door- I hope you understand, we had to confiscate your belongings for security reasons. Your armor was Enclave property to begin with anyway."

Ellen risked a moment's glance downward and caught sight of the familiar grey of Vault-issued underwear. They'd left her that, at least.

"I'll unlock the way for you. There'll be a guard waiting for you outside- getting used to this place's layout is a job in itself, and I wouldn't want you to get lost. I'll unlock your restraints as well. I'll be waiting for you in my office. Please don't tarry."

With that the blue light on the wall winked out. So did the energy field. The restraints unclamped themselves a moment later, sending Ellen sprawling to the cell floor. She lay there a moment, trying to get her bearings, her breath-

I'm in an Enclave prison facility somewhere that I've never been. They've taken all of my things. They've taken everything I've tried to keep them from getting. They've stuck me with truth drugs and one of them wants to torture me and the President wants to interrogate me and they've probably killed Cross and the only thing keeping me alive is that they need something I don't actually know-

The fear that the camera would turn back on (that blue light had to be a camera) or that Colonel Autumn would come back was all that kept her from dissolving into a puddle of tears on the spot. It had been a bad day for some time now, and it did not particularly look like it was about to get better.

Raven Rock

Spend nineteen years of your life in a Vault and you develop a good sense of direction for navigating underground, but even Ellen had to admit that without the Enclave guard at her elbow she'd have been lost by now. The uniformed man didn't talk as they wended their way through endless corridors, except to say 'Don't touch that' or 'Turn here', or other things of that nature. It was probably just as well. Ellen didn't know what to say to a man in the Enclave's service, or what one of them might say to her.

Once, early on, they passed through an area of cramped metal corridors and closed steel doors with no windows, only numbers. She almost asked how big their prison facilities were, but a tiny lit screen next to one of the doors caught her eye: Vargas, Nathaniel. She winced, remembering the old man in Megaton who'd sung the Enclave's praises so long ago, and wondered if it was him. If the Enclave had taken Megaton. If-

There was a point when the guard walked her through room after room of scientific equipment. There were robots disassembled there, and suits of power armor. In one room there were orange-lit tubes that ran from floor to ceiling, like something out of Vault 108, only empty. In another room there were the same tubes, but they held unconscious figures- here a Deathclaw, here a faintly glowing ghoul, here one of the monstrous mutants of Vault 87. A third room held what looked like disembodied brains in half-domes of biogel. Ellen looked away quickly, silently praying that they were just renovating old Robobrain bodies for them rather than adapting newly captured brains to a life of robotic service.

Up a flight of stairs and down another corridor, and they passed through a room full of huge metal boxes. The smell was so pungent that Ellen had to ask what they were. Her guard merely glanced at one and said, "Deathclaws." She fell silent after that.

There was the closed door labeled VERTIBIRD HANGAR.

There was the closed door labeled OFFICERS' QUARTERS.

There was the closed door labeled CLEARANCE REQUIRED; it smelled of ozone, and the guard hurried past it quickly.

And there were other doors, so many of them, the armory and the mess hall and the storerooms and door after door after door of barracks... she lost count. It was as if someone had taken every Vault she'd ever seen and conglomerated them all together, and filled it with people, and then said, "No... make it bigger." Its dark metal and cold blue light construction seemed to press down on her as they moved through its vastness. She wanted very, very much to turn and run- to where, she didn't know, but... to somewhere. Anywhere other than here.

And then the guard stopped in front of a door that looked like any other door. "This is where you and I part ways," he said with a sour look as he moved to unlock the door. "You're the one who's been invited to see the President, not me."

"What- this is his-"

"Just go in and take the stairs," said the guard. "That's all I'm authorized to know."

He glared at Ellen until she stepped through the door, and then he slammed it shut behind her. The echo rang in her ears.

The room beyond the door was mostly dark, lit by bank after bank of computer indicator lights that lined the walls. A tactical display of the sort one saw in war movies took up much of the floor, showing Enclave forces throughout the Wasteland in orange. Other forces were marked, too, the mutants in green (if the markings around the Vault 87 area were anything to go by), the Brotherhood in yellow. From the look of things they counted Outcasts and Lyons' forces as one group. Ellen eyed the display a moment longer, then turned; the only way out of the room now, it seemed, was the palely-lit spiral staircase that wound upwards, circling more computer hardware. She tugged uncomfortably at the blue-and-orange prisoner jumpsuit that'd been waiting in the locker and swallowed.

The climb seemed to go on forever. By the time she reached the top Ellen had had to stop twice to catch her breath, and to avoid being violently sick. There was a complex assemblage of wires and vents here, all feeding into a massive central box that resembled nothing so much as the old Vault 101 mainframe's central unit. A maintenance walkway ran around it, with a smaller walkway branch running across that nightmarish downward darkness to an unremarkable door. That, Ellen supposed, must be the actual entrance to Eden's office. One hand on the mainframe- she didn't trust the walkway railing- she started around towards it.

"Ah-ah-ah," said the voice of John Henry Eden. "Over here. Towards the console."

Slowly, as if the platform beneath her were about to give way, Ellen turned. The mainframe's central monitor- there were several, but this one was easily half Ellen's height- showed only a single line of blue-white across the center of the screen's blackness. It pulsated in time with the words as Eden's voice said, "Ah, face to face at last. It's high time we met." There was something like a chuckle to the words as Eden continued, "I'm quite pleased you were able to make it. Your trip here was not what I intended, but I think it served as an adequate test of your abilites."

Ellen closed her eyes for a long moment, pushing images of the Wizard of Oz and his curtain out of her mind. When she opened her eyes nothing had changed, so she only said, "It's a pleasure to meet you, Mr. President."

"How very open-minded of you," the computer- Eden- said, sounding pleased. "Kudos for embracing the reality of the situation, rather than railing against it. Let's get to brass tacks, shall we? There are some things I'd like to talk to you about..."